The Palestinian Authority is setting up a de facto state as a step to appeal to international courts to declare Israel an occupying power, according to James Hider, the Middle East bureau chief for the Times of London . Fayyad is preparing a new plan for the PA economy and security forces, and told the Times in a separate interview that it will enable the PA to establish a de facto state in two years. Hider wrote that PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad plans to go ahead with his plans regardless of the state of negotiations with Israel. His self-confessed cynicism is contained in a book he wrote this summer, called “The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War.” Blaming both Israel and the PA for the current stalemate, he said that Fayyad’s plan “would be to grow a functioning state around the continuing Israeli occupation and then ask the international community to judge whether such a military occupation was acceptable.” Hider noted that the mutual anger and distrust between the PA and Israel stem from Israel’s continuing to build Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria while the PA, under Arafat, did not control varied terrorist organizations. His analysis failed to acknowledge that Arafat authorized hundreds of the deadly attacks, many of them suicidal, against Israeli civilians and soldiers. The Bush administration is also on his “blame list” for having “put little effort into enforcing the requirements set out in its own peace blueprint, allowing settlements to continue expanding and only focusing on building a centralized Palestinian security apparatus after Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007.”
